Twitter Becomes A Japanese Role-Playing Game

Even those who find social networking tool Twitter a vapid waste of time might be interested in this, a new role-playing title from Japanese publishers Marvelous that takes a person's Twitter feed and builds a game out of it.

Called Followars, it builds a role-playing party for you out of whatever's on your Twitter feed: stuff like your hit points and attack stats determined by criteria like the number of tweets you've made and the number of people following you.

In other words, think Pokemon. Only the monsters are you. Their stats, your Twitter trends.

While it sounds a bit light, know it's being designed by Kenichi Nishi, the man behind Chibi-Robo, and is not only being built specifically for Apple's iPad, but for hot-seat multiplayer, two players able to fight it out on a single iPad.

It should be out later this week, right in time for the iPad's launch. That is, unless it's an April Fool's joke. And it'd be a shame were that the case, because this is actually a really neat idea.